Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit has written more than twenty-five books since 1991, and almost none of them look like the one before it — a history of walking, a biography of a photographer, a study of disaster response, a feminist essay collection, a memoir, a retelling of Cinderella, a book about George Orwell’s rose garden. What holds it together is a way of thinking that treats a walk, a city, or a single flower bed as a legitimate way into the largest questions about power, memory, and who gets to tell the story. Below is a chronological list of her major published books.
By Lisanne Swart · 19 major works · 1994–2026 · Updated July 2026
Where to start
Her most influential book
Men Explain Things to Me (2014) — the essay collection that shaped how a generation talks about being talked over.
Her most acclaimed book
River of Shadows (2003) — National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and her best entry point for narrative nonfiction.
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
Solnit examines two contested American landscapes, a Nevada nuclear test site and Yosemite National Park, drawing on her own activist work with the Western Shoshone Defense Project to explore land, memory, and the myths built on top of both.
A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland
Traveling through Ireland with a newly acquired passport from forgotten maternal ancestors, Solnit uses the country’s fluid, contested identity to explore invasion, colonization, emigration, and nomadism as a postcolonial revision of conventional travel writing.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
A cultural and intellectual history tracing walking as a practice tied to thinking, protest, pilgrimage, and pleasure across centuries and continents, from ancient philosophy to modern urban life.
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild WestStart here
A biography of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1872 breakthrough in capturing high-speed motion became a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of American life. It won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award.
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Written in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, this book argues against despair by tracing histories of grassroots activism and unforeseen victories, making the case that meaningful change often arrives from unpredictable directions. It was later revised and reissued, and was included in The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
A meditative essay collection on the value of uncertainty, disorientation, and not knowing, weaving together art history, memoir, and philosophy to argue that getting lost can be a doorway rather than a failure.
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
A collection of essays ranging from formal art criticism to lyrical personal meditation, exploring nuclear test sites, national borders, deserts, and the sublime as expressions of a politically charged landscape.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
Drawing on case studies including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, Solnit argues that disasters often produce spontaneous altruism and community rather than the panic and chaos typically assumed. It was revised and reissued in 2020.
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
The first of Solnit’s city atlases, pairing unconventional maps with essays to reveal the layered, contradictory histories hidden within a single city’s geography.
The Faraway Nearby
A wide-ranging memoir structured loosely around a mountain of apricots from her dying mother’s tree, weaving together storytelling, illness, and family to examine how narrative shapes identity and survival.
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas
The second of Solnit’s atlas collaborations, applying the same layered-map approach to New Orleans, tracing the city’s music, race, water, and history through unconventional cartography.
Men Explain Things to Me
Solnit’s best-known book collects essays on feminism and women’s writing, anchored by the title essay recounting being condescendingly explained her own book by a man at a party. The essay is widely credited with helping popularize the term “mansplaining,” though Solnit has noted she never used the word itself.
The Mother of All Questions
A follow-up essay collection continuing Solnit’s feminist inquiry, addressing silencing, storytelling, and the questions women are and aren’t permitted to ask about their own lives.
Call Them by Their True Names
An essay collection on American political language and power, arguing that precise naming, rather than euphemism, is a necessary first step toward political clarity and change. It won the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
Cinderella Liberator
A retelling of the Cinderella story for young readers, rewriting the fairy tale’s ending around friendship and self-determination rather than rescue by marriage.
Recollections of My Nonexistence
Solnit’s memoir traces her formation as a feminist and a writer in 1980s San Francisco, set against an atmosphere of gender violence and the systematic erasure of women’s voices she experienced and observed firsthand.
Orwell’s Roses
Beginning with the discovery that George Orwell planted roses outside his cottage in 1936, Solnit uses that small act as a lens onto Orwell’s politics, his writing, and the broader relationship between pleasure, beauty, and resistance. It was named to Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of the year.
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain
A collection of essays on politics, climate, and hope written for uncertain times, and a Natalie Portman’s Book Club selection.
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change
Solnit’s most recent book continues her long-running argument about how change actually happens, published in March 2026 and selected for Natalie Portman’s Book Club.
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